New Media Awards 2008

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Bill the minister...

A version of Bill Thompson's speech to the New Media Awards when he was asked to step into the shoes of a minister - albeit briefly...

Tom Watson MP, Minister for Transformational Government in the Cabinet Office, was due to give a speech at the 2008 New Media Awards but was unable to attend due to pressing Parliamentary business. I got to speak instead. And this is what I said - roughly.

Over the last decade the Internet has gone from being something 'out there' to something 'in here', an essential part of daily life for ...

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2008 NMA winners

The victors in this year's New Statesman New Media Awards are unveiled...

New Media Awards ceremony 2008 video

Video from co-hosts http://2gether08.com/

The winners of the New Statesman New Media Awards 2008 were announced at a ceremony in London last night, Wednesday 2nd July, which was part of the 2gether08 festival of ideas, popular technology and progress.

...

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How to be a carbon vigilante

Chris Adams writes on carbon trading schemes and buying one's way back into heaven.

Most of us are aware of carbon offsets now - to some they’re a godsend, to others they’re little more than a the 21st century equivalent to indulgences from the Catholic Church of the middle ages - if you had enough money, you could make up for your ...

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The Hansard digitisation project

A handful of web developers are making 200 years' worth of parliamentary sessions available online and changing the way we think of government IT in the process.

There may yet be hope for government projects, if Hansard 1804 - 2004 is anything to go by.

It's hard to read the phrase 'government IT projects' in the news without them usually being followed by words like 'over-budget', 'delays' or 'expensive consultants'. But look hard enough, and every now and then you see something really interesting being done with comparatively tiny resources. The Hansard digitisation project is one ...

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The bustle of participation

There are disturbing parallels between the world Samuel Johnson describes and our use of the new generation of social tools

I’ve been up for an hour. In that time I’ve updated my Facebook status and dismissed various invitations to become a Zombie or share virtual fish or garden plants, sent a few Tweets, looked through the various blog postings that Bloglines has picked up from the RSS feeds I subscribe to, added new services to Friendfeed and replied to a dozen emails.

I’ve been far too busy to do any ...

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The upside of the downturn

Chris Adams believes that economic jitters could provide a catalyst for social innovation

When you're writing about social innovation and the web, and you work with the web daily, it's very easy to get overexcited about the fact that there is now a regular stream of people who want to talk to you and work with you on Idealistic Worthy Projects That Will Save The World. And sometimes, you even get paid for them.

Outside the online echo-chamber though, things look less upbeat. ...

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100m Hours of Thought

There's a powerful meme doing the rounds at the moment online, linking gin with sitcoms, TV and the wikipedia, put forward by academic Clay Shirky.

It proposes that TV sit-coms for the last 50 years have served largely the same role that gin did during the industrial revolution, and that interactive, collaborative media (like the wikipedia project) are roughly analogous to the formation of the welfare state infrastructure set ...

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Cram a load of geeks in a building...

Corbet Place in the Truman Brewery, East London is heaving with geeks and city workers, drawn by the lure of an open bar. At one end of the space people are swapping stories over a beer, while at the other handful of earnest looking men are hovering around a raised stage, with some kind of presentation projected onto the wall behind. One picks up a mike, and starts trying to ...

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Make sure you can speak freely

Online groups should try to maintain their own sites rather than piggy-backing off other sites like Facebook.com because that gives them more control over their content.

Many of the strategies, techniques and tools that have been developed in the last ten years of mainstream web use are struggling to make the transition to the Web 2.0 world.

Media sites have had to turn from being one-way publishers of information into conversational spaces while more and more of us are using social network sites to manage aspects of our online and offline lives. We seize on new ...

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Reviewing public services online

Chris Adams says that there are problems with reviewing public services online because the technical barriers are so low.

This month, MySociety released the latest metrics from writetothem.com, a civic engagement tool designed to make it easier for constituents to raise issues with their MP. As ever, the stats make for fascinating reading, if not least because they give a glimpse of what accountability in a networked democracy might look like.

There are league tables, metrics on how good MPs are at responding to issues raised, and ...

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